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It sure is nice to have actual baseball to talk about again. Tuesday, the Rays were facing the Orioles and, up 3-2 in the top of the seventh, Joe Maddon brought Jake McGee in to relieve David Price. There are some things worth noting about Jake McGee. 

Thing One: Dude Throws Fast
With each McGee pitch, the velocity readings on SunSports’ graphic seemed to get bigger and bigger. There’s no way Jake McGee throws 97 all the time, right? I mean, Jake McGee? There must be some bias in the home broadcast network’s radar gun. That’s always something I’ve heard, that the speeds you see on television are unreliable, that television networks pump up the speeds for their own pitchers. I wondered if that was true, so I decided to do a little experiment. I watched the half inning over again on the Rays TV network (SunSports) and wrote down their posted speed for every pitch. Then I did the same thing again, but this time for the Orioles network (MASN). Then I checked the speeds against those posted on MLB GameDay and on our own Brooks Baseball.

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In the week leading up to Opening Day, we're asking and answering three questions about each team in a five-part series ordered by descending Playoff Pct from the Playoff Odds Report. Today, we continue with a look at the group of six teams with the third-highest odds of winning at least a Wild Card. As a reminder, you can find links to our preview podcasts for each team here.

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They say spring training can’t teach you anything. I watched nine whole innings of spring training baseball last Saturday to try to disprove that and I thought I’d share my findings with you.

1. Jealousy

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Nowadays, when we talk about Robinson Cano we talk about his next contract. A $200 million deal has been widely speculated (like here and here) and that’s certainly within the realm of possibility. While it’s an interesting topic, Cano has employed Scott Boras, so I’m guessing we’ll have lots of time to cover it, as an in-season extension with the Yankees seems unlikely.

Instead, I’m more curious as to where Cano came from. If what you’re thinking starts with his mommy and daddy had some wine then no. I mean in a prospect sense. Cano emerged an All-Star from what was widely thought to be a depleted farm system. He began his minor-league career at the age of 18 in 2001. He didn’t make the majors until 2005 so he had ample time to make a few top prospects lists on the way to the Show, but he never did. Well, that’s not entirely true. He was not listed on any of the Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects lists during his time in the minors, and never ranked first overall on the annual Yankees Top 10 list, like you might expect from a future franchise player. He was ranked second once, but given the general state of the Yankees system, nobody took him too seriously.

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This past week brought news that the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history has decided to retire following the season. Mariano Rivera broke into the major leagues with the Yankees in 1995. That season he appeared in 19 games for New York, starting 10, with an ERA of 5.51. That was the last season in his 18-year career that he started games and, other than 2007, the last in which he posted an ERA over the 3.00. He may not be a first ballot Hall of Famer, but if not it’ll be due to ridiculousness on the part of the voters.

While Rivera prepares for his graceful swan song, a coda to a certain Hall of Fame career, another all-time great is preparing for a very different postscript. This past weekend CBS’s Jon Heyman reported that Manny Ramirez signed a contract to play with the Rhinos. That would be the EDA Rhinos of Taiwan. The Rhinos play in the Chinese Professional Baseball League, which, I have been informed through a very special source COUGHwikipediaCOUGH, contains four teams. Including the Rhinos.

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The last thing I want to do is rehash the American League MVP debate. There is a long list of sharp objects I’d fit into my cornea before doing that. So I’m not doing that, I promise. However, the Miguel Cabrera vs. Mike Trout matchup highlights an interesting aspect of player value that's easy to measure but hard to see.

In contrast to hitting and fielding, baserunning can go unnoticed if you’re not specifically looking for it. It’s easy to focus on the pitcher and the hitter while ignoring what goes on just beyond the camera’s lens. Fortunately, there are stats that track who was good at running the bases and who wasn’t, and looking at the differences between the two AL MVP candidates is a convenient if untimely way to illustrate them.

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After the 2005 season, Red Sox GM Theo Epstein donned a gorilla costume and snuck undetected out of Fenway Park. Going back centuries, this is how Epsteins quit their jobs. A few months later owner John Henry coaxed Epstein back to work. (He wore, as is the family custom, an alligator outfit). While he was gone, the Red Sox’ reins were held jointly by three people: Jed Hoyer, now general manager of the Cubs under Epstein; Ben Cherington, Epstein’s eventual successor as general manager in Boston; and Bill Lajoie, a veteran front office man and former player who ran the Tigers in the mid-to-late ’80s. Despite persistent rumors that Epstein would come back, the Red Sox didn’t sit around waiting. While Mark Loretta and top prospect Andy Marte were intriguing acquisitions, the group’s crowing achievement was sending Hanley Ramirez, Anibal Sanchez, Harvey Garcia, and Jesus Delgado to Florida for Josh Beckett, Guillermo Mota, and Mike Lowell. It was a polarizing trade at the time and remains one to this day.

This past summer, seven seasons after the trade was consummated, an ending of sorts occurred. The Dodgers acquired both Ramirez and Beckett from Miami and Boston, respectively, while Miami dealt Sanchez to Detroit. Thus, as the 2013 season dawns, all of the players in the deal have moved on from their acquiring teams. This seems like the perfect time to look back at the deal.

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This will shock you: a while back I made an entirely unoriginal joke. Edwin Jackson had signed a four-year contract with the Cubs and I said I was disappointed because that made him much less likely to change teams again. Not funny, I know, but fortunately it’s the topic of the joke I’m more concerned with now. At the age of 29, Jackson will play for his eighth team this season. That, as realtors say, is a lot. So, if you’re one of those people who would love to see Jackson play for every major-league team just for the novelty of it, then a four-year restriction on his changing teams isn’t what you want to see.

Now that Jackson appears to be staying put for a while, maybe he’ll pass the scepter to Sandy Rosario. And maybe Rosario will refuse it because he has done almost as much this offseason as Jackson has in his career. When I say “done as much” I’m not referring to actual pitching. Rosario has thrown 7 2/3 innings over parts of three seasons for the Marlins while putting up a 15.26 ERA, so we’re not talking on-field exploits here. No, it’s his whiplash-inducing offseason. You see, in the span of two months, the end of October through December, Rosario changed organizations five times. He was traded once and selected off waivers four separate times. In a two-week span he was:

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